Authors: Jack McDonald Burnett
Neither astronaut would learn to fly their spacecraft during their first round of NASA training: Eyechart was commanding a European vehicle, Conn a proprietary Dyna-Tech craft, and NASA didn’t yet have a simulator for either one. Instead, they were undergoing two weeks of strength and endurance training at the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, followed by three weeks to begin learning their pressure suits inside and out, and then using them in simulated low and no gravity at the Neutral Buoyancy Lab in Houston. Finally, they would go to Elgin Air Force Base in Florida for a week-long crash course in water survival.
Conn’s days in the first week of training started at 6:00 a.m. with supervised stretching. She bounced with energy during her stretches, and was chastised by her NASA fitness trainer. “Bouncing doesn’t stretch you, it yanks you,” Joe Trevose said. “It takes your muscle and pulls hard on it. Sometimes it tears. You don’t want that.”
After stretching came jogging for Conn, and some kind of physical therapy for Eyechart that he didn’t discuss with her. Conn’s instructions were to jog around the south and west property lines of Cleveland Hopkins International Airport before breakfast. Three and a half miles out, three and a half miles back to NASA Glenn in the early morning Ohio spring air, ambient temperatures in the high thirties or low forties. Once outside, Conn took the course at a run, and barely let up until she was back where she started. Planes were just starting their days, and a sleepy few would take off while she ran. Not many landed in Cleveland at 7:00 a.m. Conn waved to the taxiing planes when she was near enough. She was pretty sure some people waved back—her training at NASA Glenn was an open secret, and some travelers might have guessed the identity of this early jogger around the airport.
She was grateful not to have to jog with Eyechart, but they did have breakfast together at eight thirty. There, Conn was able to avoid the cosmonaut by being a celebrity: that first week, plenty of NASA Glenn employees wanted pictures with her, wanted to wish her well, just wanted to see her. Less frequently, people would make the effort to shake Eyechart’s hand as well. He was going to the moon, after all, and he had spent more time in space than all but a very few NASA astronauts. That got him some attention, and certainly admiration. He acknowledged both with grunts and long faces.
After breakfast, the astronauts had free time until ten, followed by an hour’s classroom time learning about the developments in aerospace engineering and astronautics over the last ten years. Conn was bouncy through this, too, having just earned a bachelor’s degree in the subject. She could tell Eyechart wasn’t thrilled about the class, but he did concentrate and take notes. When something surprised him, he made a strangled, almost choking noise, and then smiled at the instructor. Conn couldn’t think of anything in her life that had ever been more annoying.
From eleven to twelve thirty, interval training: Conn and Eyechart each on a treadmill or stationary bike, pacing themselves until the signal at regular intervals which meant they should go all out for ten seconds (the first couple days) or fifteen seconds (the rest of the week), then wind back down to their previous pace.
Lunch was at one, and Conn had just as many visitors the first few days as at breakfast. Monday night she did a search for her face on her Wear. She found at least twenty pictures taken that very day by employees and others at NASA Glenn, posted proudly for the world to see.
Grant got hold of her on Wednesday, wanting to know how Conn found astronaut training. She gushed to him about it. “You told me all about your training, but that was something that happened to someone else. You know? This is happening to me. Really happening!”
“I couldn’t be happier for you, Conn,” Grant said, and Conn knew he meant it. Conn talked Grant’s ear off for twenty minutes, barely letting him get a word in. When she hung up, she smiled. Her relationship with Grant had been a source of regret for her, since their breakup. She felt like she had made everything right between them on the phone.
Thursday, in lieu of lunch, Conn agreed to speak at a middle school assembly arranged in her honor. She was a motormouth there too: they had to politely stop her after a while.
At two thirty, the astronauts hit the pool—not the Neutral Buoyancy Lab “pool” where they would train underwater for their time in space, but a regular Olympic swimming pool where they did stretches and exercises with resistance. Then from four to five, it was yoga stretching. Conn felt like a million bucks at the end of each day, already anxious to start the next one.
Friday of the first week—they would train Monday through Saturday—Peo called. Conn was excited to hear from her.
“I saw footage of your talk at the middle school,” Peo said.
“I hope it was OK to do that,” Conn said. “They kind of sprung it on me, but to be honest, I wasn’t eating that much at lunch anyway because there are always so many people who want to see me. I was glad to have something else to do.”
“No, it wasn’t OK. You didn’t do anything wrong, but that kind of thing won’t be happening again while you’re training.”
“I suppose that’s good. Yeah, it’s probably best that we have more control over who I talk to and when and about what, rather than
oh, there’s a middle school down the road
or whatever.”
Peo was quiet momentarily. Then she said, “Conn, are you OK, really?”
“Never better,” Conn said. “I love it here. Well, I love training. I can’t believe it’s really happening, and I have you to thank for it. Thank you so much—”
“Constance.”
“Yes?”
“Do you have your medication with you, or did you leave it behind?”
Conn swallowed. “No! No, I have it, of course. Of course I do. Why?”
“I understand that you want to do well and make a good impression. But I shouldn’t have to tell you that going off your medication is not an option.”
“I just thought I could—”
“
Period
. Not. An. Option. You are to take your medication again starting immediately, or whenever your next dose is supposed to be.”
“Tonight before bed,” Conn said glumly.
“It’s easy to make yourself believe you can control your illness because you’re older and wiser, but it’s not true. You make yourself unwell when you stop taking your medication. You make yourself unfit.”
Conn mumbled an apology.
“If I discover that you’ve stopped taking any medication you’ve been prescribed, for any reason, I will replace you just like I did Ashlyn Flaherty. I am not playing around, Conn. Take me seriously.”
Conn did take her seriously. It really was a bad idea to stop taking her meds. This was proven Saturday, when Conn wasn’t feeling well, and Sunday and then Monday, when she barely made it out of bed. She was nauseous, weak and worn out. On Monday, a NASA doctor was called in to examine her.
“Are you currently taking any medications?” was one of his questions. Conn said she was: Symbax, Levalil, Wellbutrin. She told him she didn’t take them for almost two weeks, but that she started back up Friday night. The doctor looked like his pet kitten had just told him to lose twenty pounds. When he recovered, he said Conn’s illness was likely caused by stopping then restarting her meds, which Conn could have told
him
, and then he took off looking like he had a purpose. Conn heard later that he’d tried to get her disqualified for space, somehow, but since she was working for Peo, not for NASA, there was nothing he could do.
She knew she had dodged a bullet.
May–June, 2033
Her missing training on Monday didn’t do anything to make Eyechart take her more seriously. Conn kept her head down and worked harder the rest of their time in Cleveland. The physical stuff, anyway. She was allowed to skip the 10:00 a.m. “class” time the second week since they wouldn’t cover anything she hadn’t just learned as an aerospace engineering major. She watched movies instead—
Apollo 13
,
The Right Stuff
,
The Eagle
, true stories.
Despite the oppressive Houston heat, Conn didn’t miss Cleveland after they left. She associated it with getting sore and sick. Three weeks at the Johnson Space Center’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab was sure to take her mind off it.
The facility that gave the lab its name was a giant pool about the size of Conn’s entire high school gymnasium and twelve feet deep. Replicas of parts of the International Space Station, Gasoline Alley, and Lagrange Point fluttered under the water. The water was a solution that mimicked zero gravity—you didn’t float to the top. Thus, the name of the lab.
Conn wasn’t thrilled about zero-G training—it seemed daunting—but by weighing down their pressure suits, the pool could also simulate the one-sixth gravity on the surface of the moon. That, she looked forward to. Conn already had nightmares in which she tripped over her own feet and fell with her first step on the moon, and a billion people saw it. Because they would, if she did.
The crews of the joint mission and the Dyna-Tech spacecraft used the same pressure suits, manufactured in Delaware. After a good fifty or sixty years with virtually no change, the suit had been substantially redesigned in the twenty-teens and twenties, right before Peo’s trip to the moon. Eyechart had never put one on, either, having used a Russian model for his twenty years of active space duty. It pleased Conn that they were starting at the same level with something.
She learned first thing that it took two people to put one pressure suit on. In a couple weeks, they would learn how to get into one alone. For now, Conn and Eyechart had to cooperate.
In a changing room, Conn put on a diaper and some cotton long underwear. You didn’t need a diaper in training, you hoped, but putting it on was a good habit to get into. She would be grateful to have one after about ten hours on the surface of the moon. She donned a “Snoopy cap,” a leather bowl-shaped covering with what looked like floppy ears, a last remnant of the old space suits. Once it was on your head, your radio microphone was right there by the side of your mouth with a cord that plugged into the pressure suit. She put on a pair of cotton gloves and left the changing room to find Eyechart in the same underclothes as her, protesting, “I don’t use this,” and holding his Snoopy cap like it was a dead animal. The patient NASA instructor told him that yes, he did, because that’s how the radio worked in these suits.
Two suits hung on the wall, each with a separate top and bottom. When they were locked together, flexible tubes ran from above the ankle to just behind the armpits. The top had additional tubes from wrists to shoulder blades, and the bottoms from inside the ankle to about the tailbone. The setup allowed different parts of the body to be pressurized separately, or rather, made it so that if one part of the body depressurized, the core might not, and the astronaut might not die.
They detached the two parts and pulled the bottoms on like pants. There were boots built in, with a hinge to keep the feet from being rigid when pressurized. Thigh and shin were connected but hinged as well, which allowed some flexing of the knees.
They shrugged into their tops, then sealed the connections. Wrists and elbow segments were separate, like ankles and knees, allowing some flexibility. Conn plugged her radio into a port on the ring of her suit’s neck. She rotated at the waist, getting a feel for how flexible the suit would be when pressurized. The inside of her suit smelled faintly of body odor. She thought she could taste stale air, but she knew it was her imagination—no helmet on, yet. Her heart hammered: this was bringing home the reality for her. She was going to the moon. It felt like she wasn’t going to be able to move very much when she got there, but she was going. She suppressed delighted giggles, tried to be all business.
They put on and attached the suit’s gloves. Conn flexed her fingers: a good fit. Finally, the helmet, looking like a giant bubble her neck was blowing. Everything echoed faintly when it locked on. Eyechart said something that made the instructor laugh. It wasn’t about her, she was pretty sure, but she felt a little conspicuous. Eyechart checked the seals all over her suit, and she checked his.
Within days, they would put the suits on underwater to get used to doing it in low- and zero-G. For now, once they were completely suited up and sealed, they were shown how to pressurize the suits—another thing that was easier for a partner to do. The baggy suit inflated some, and their movements became very stiff. She gladly endured it, though. Exposed to the vacuum of space, their blood, which was used to having to pump at a certain rate against the pressure of the air, would pump far too hard, and gush from every available orifice and then freeze at absolute zero. Or at least that’s how Conn imagined it. The suits kept Earth-normal pressure on their bodies, so their blood could behave as though they were in Houston, Texas, not on the moon.
Conn couldn’t feel the hinges at her ankles or wrists working at all, though she supposed they must be. Her knees and elbows bent only with great effort. “That’s about twenty times more freedom of movement than, say, space shuttle astronauts had. Or Neil Armstrong, for that matter,” the instructor told them. He was short, bald, and peppy, and obviously the kind of teacher who used carrots instead of sticks. “The hinges are there more to bear the force of your movements than to let you swivel around and do squats. You’ll be glad for them after a few hours, believe me.”
Their first week underwater was spent without pressure suits, just a breathing apparatus, so they could get used to zero-G inside a spacecraft. Eyechart could have taught that week, obviously, but he gamely went through the training start to finish. It made Conn feel bad for skipping their classes that second week in Cleveland. Then they moved into full suits, and learned to use all their tools in zero-G—or rather, all the tools that would be going with Eyechart; what was going in the privately owned Dyna-Tech spacecraft, tools included, was private property and therefore, nobody’s business.
During their last week in Houston, their suits were weighed down to make walking on the bottom of the pool a similar experience to the surface of the moon. Conn had another moment of
this is actually happening
as she bounded along the bottom. It wasn’t perfect—there would be no water resistance on the moon—but she started to master the locomotion. She did trip, but because it was practice, and a billion people weren’t watching, she laughed and tried again. Time underwater seemed to pass quickly for Conn. When they were done for the day, she wanted to stay in the pool, like an eight-year-old when Mommy tells her it’s time to go.